Production Leader / Senior Production Manager

About the role

We are seeking an experienced Production Leader to oversee the satellite manufacturing production team at our Burlingame, CA facility. The role involves managing production planning, shop floor leadership, and ensuring high-quality, on-time execution of production activities.

Responsibilities

• Manage the production team responsible for safe, high quality, on-time, scaled production of the Xona satellite.
• Manage overall production processes and activities; production work order planning, shift staffing, shift hand-over communications, operational KPI tracking and production facility efficiency.
• Lead, coach, and develop a highly effective production team and maintain high standards of safety, accountability and performance.
• Demonstrate high levels of autonomy and cross-team collaboration to deliver on the production ramp-up targets.
• Support the maturation and continuous improvement of the production system, while aggressively driving down the cost learning curve.
• Drive to optimize workforce efficiency, equipment capacity, minimize work in progress and maximize build quality.
• Oversee the equipment maintenance and facilities function.
• Support the development and management of the production budget, including capital expenditure, logistics, production tools and staffing roadmap.

Requirements

• 5+ years in a supervisor or manager role in a scaled, production facility, preferably with complex, highly engineered products, with an emphasis on assembly, integration and testing at production build rates of >2/week.
• Holds a Bachelor’s degree at a minimum in Engineering, Manufacturing, Operations Management, or related field.
• Experience in a Space industry manufacturing business, or A&D manufacturing business is desirable.
• Experience with manufacturing products that require extensive hardware and software assembly, integration and testing is ideal.
• Knowledge of lean manufacturing and TPM fundamentals and ability to apply and implement these effectively in a production environment.
• Working knowledge of six sigma is highly preferred.
• Comfortable in an environment where plans and processes are being developed and iterated in response to customer or market forces.
• Working knowledge of ERP/MES/QA digital systems and how these fully integrate into an efficient digital factory as a critical tool for the production team.
• Understanding of what a QMS system is and building teams that respect and manage within this essential production framework.
• Ability to initiate processes, tools and methods that are not in place yet and ensure they are adopted and continually assessed and improved over time.
• Excellent leadership, communication and organizational skills. Able to hire, grow and mentor others to build and lead a highly effective production team.

Qualifications

• To comply with U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the United States (i.e. Green Card holder), or other protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).
• To comply with U.K. regulations, this role requires Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS) checks, and successful candidates must be eligible to obtain UK Security Clearance (SC).
• To comply with Canadian regulations, successful candidates must obtain and hold a security clearance at the reliability status level, and pass security assessment for the Canadian Controlled Goods Program (CGP) and ITAR.